


Where The Sun and The Moon Collide

by JoanofArc



Series: Tumblr Drabbles & Ficlets [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, it fluff, maybe they'll actually kiss at some point, obi wan kenobi deserves happiness, qui gon jinn is a good space dad, satine kryze deserves happiness, they smol, well this was a literal rollercoaster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 12:48:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14545107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoanofArc/pseuds/JoanofArc
Summary: during the time spent under jedi protection, a meeting between obi-wan, satine and some venom-mites does not go as planned.





	Where The Sun and The Moon Collide

“Satine, behind you!”

Obi-Wan’s rushed voice barely reaches her past the noise of the venom-mites. His lightsaber cuts through their carcass in a sweep, scattering blood everywhere, but they grow in number with every second, and she had not been trained in combat as he had.

The monstrous creatures should not have been such a handful. They are barely the size of her forearm, with long antennae and bulbous eyes, but their six spider-like legs carry them quickly.

In all honesty, they had only ventured from the camp to gather some food, seeing how the rations were only getting smaller and Qui-Gon was gone to secure them safe passage away from Draboon. He had promised to return at dusk, but it is well past noon the next day. Sitting around in a camp was bound to lead into arguments and snappy comments, fuelled by the exhaustion that takes her over and his own irritability, so going for a walk was the best option. His Master had means to contact them, anyway.

Satine is surprisingly knowledgeable in plant kind – Obi-Wan can give her that. She has a natural knack of deciding which strange plant is edible and which is not, even when they all look like they had been taken straight from a fever-induced nightmare. Although cooking is a skill she does not possess (something both he and his Master had learned the hard way), she can gather. He would have supposed someone of her rank and upbringing would shy away from getting their hands dirty. Not Satine.

Still, their little exploratory mission had ended in disaster when they stumbled over a venom-mite nest, effectively triggering an avalanche of small critters that could definitely kill them if they were not careful. Alone, their venom was not strong enough to stop an adult’s heart, but together they are lethal.

Another swing of his lightsaber and he can see the path as the creatures disperse, hissing angrily at the heat and noise. Satine steps closer to him, her fingers reaching out for the edge of his robes, more to keep herself grounded than anything else.

It all happens far too quickly.

It had rained the night prior; the ground slippery and muddy, her foot slips and she falls backwards. Pain shoots through her wrist as it is forced to take the blunt of the impact, but something hurts more viscerally, like thousand needles stabbing into her ankle at the same time.

“Satine!”

Obi-Wan’s voice starts sounding far away even though she  _knows_  he has to be only a short distance away. Everything starts looking distorted, as if she is watching from underwater.

The last thing she remembers is a cool hand on her forehead and a new jolt of pain going through her ankle.

The air feels fuzzy – almost fur-like. Had she not been viscerally aware she is trapped on one of Mandalore’s moons, Satine would think herself at sea, with the way her body bobs up and down on its own accord.

She had always loved the sea.

Bo, always more adventurous and fearless of the two sisters, would take her hand and drag her away from papa’s scornful gaze and mama’s quiet submissiveness and together, feet bare and nightgown tickling their ankles, would chase the waves and search for sea shells on the blackened beaches. They never dared go into the water – monstrous creatures lurked just beneath the surface, waiting for their next victim. It made everything all the more thrilling.

But why does thinking about Bo hurt?

Even more, why is her whole body numb, but for the burning sensation in her leg?

Was she shot? No blaster wound hurts like this, but perhaps it was something else. The bounty hunters are inventive when it comes to weaponry, something she  _knows_ she abhors.

Did the bounty hunters catch her? Failure is uncommon in the Jedi, but Obi-Wan is just a Padawan and…

Satine stirs with all the force she can muster – she had been through too much to go down without a fight. Her captor grunts, most likely losing his footing, and she is about to open her eyes to asset her current predicament when she suddenly feels the ground shift and she’s tumbling, falling out of the arms that had been carrying her.

Her elbow crashes onto something sharp and she lets out a yelp, but the fever diminishes the pain and soon, her transportation resumes, lulling her back into sleep.

When she comes to once more, she is back at the camp.

Obi-Wan is kneeling above her, concern tinting his expressive eyes, but she feels too sick to ask questions, in too much pain to try and reason out how they ended up like this. The colours around her are both too muted and too vivid, swirling around one another like some bad art project. Blinking away the film over her eyes only makes it worse.

“You are awake, Your Grace,” Qui-Gon’s voice comes from somewhere to the left. She tries to turn her head to search for him, but Obi-Wan stops her with a hand on her cheek.

“Don’t move, you took quite the fall and you’re still burning up,” however, against his own advice, he helps her up so he can bring a glass of something appalling to her lips. She might have protested under different circumstances. Now she only wants the headache and nausea gone.

The concoction tastes awfully similar to the mouthful of sand she had taken in after tripping over the body of a fallen soldier when she was six. The memory is worse than the taste itself.

“You dropped me,” even her voice sounds distant, but she distinctly hears Qui-Gon laugh. Obi-Wan just sputters, and, had she not been so feverish and on the verge of passing out once more, she would find it amusing, perhaps even endearing, how his blush spreads from his cheeks to his ears.

The liquid he had given her settles down in her belly, cooling her down from within. It is a welcome distraction from the way her skin seems to be boiling and soon enough, her eyes flutter shut.

She dreams of Bo again -- of her anger. Of mama’s disappointment, papa’s blind rage. She dreams of fire swallowing people whole, explosions a lullaby for two children that never got to be children.

Had this not been a constant, she would have blamed it on the fever.

When she wakes again, the fire is burning and she feels like herself again, even though the rest has been fitful. The dizziness and the queasiness is gone, only her ankle and elbow hurt, but even that is manageable.

“You were squirming.”

She startles, only now realising that the cushion stuffed between the ground and her head is actually Obi-Wan’s thigh. His hands stop fussing with her hair and she instantly misses it. He doesn’t pull back, however. Just rests his fingers against her temple, across her forehead, most likely taking her temperature.

Once satisfied she is not dying of fever, he moves them to her cheek.

For a moment Satine thinks he is talking about her nightmares, and she is about to retaliate, spew forth a poorly conceived, panic induced lie, but he continues on, as if sensing her distress.

“I was trying to get us away – one of the venom-mites bit you and you were unconscious but then you started squirming and it startled me.”

Satine blinks up, confused, before he touches his hand to her elbow and everything comes back.  _So it was not a bounty hunter after all_.

No need to let him know that, however.

“I thought you ought to be in tune with everything around you, Ben,”

The way the secret nickname rolls off her tongue might be the cause of his fluster, or perhaps it is her teasing. One thing is for sure; they enjoy pressing one another’s buttons, a quest to get under their skin and into their head, and this incident is to be a well of such moments for the foreseeable future.

He knows, by the way he furrows his brows.

But while she was expecting some sort of retaliation, he remains silent, almost pensive. The place where his fingers are touching her skin burn as hot as the fever had.

“You… were worried for me, weren’t you?” She doesn’t mean to sound so surprised – they have been on the run together for months now and she had grown to like him, whereas in the beginning his sole presence irritated her. Satine knows now it had nothing to do with him. The stress of a lifetime of war, of losing her parents so violently in front of her very eyes, they had made her cold and snappy with strangers. Obi-Wan had only been there at the wrong time.

Still, she shifts even as he tries to tell her not to. Still dizzy from the venom, it takes a while for her to sit upright, but he holds onto her arm to steady her and this time it is her fingers that find his cheekbone, a smile flitting at the corners of her lips. Her elbow still twinges and the wound will definitely scar. It is not big by any means, and he and his Master had patched her up well enough – fact whose implications she does not want to ponder on much – but it is there nonetheless, a forever reminder of this moment, suspended in time.

“Kiss it better?” The same elbow is offered to him, a quirk of her eyebrow.

“I—Satine… what?!”

All Jedi composure seems to crumble. His fingers curl around her arm tighter. Obi-Wan looks the proverbial wet dog in the navigation lights and she is overtaken with the sudden urge to kiss  _him_. She does not know how or when that thought crept up from the depths of her heart, but she brushes it off, blinks at him from beneath long lashes in an attempt at faux innocence.

He sees right through it, by the way he lifts his eyebrows at her.

“It hurts. You dropped me. It’s only the decent thing to do to kiss it better, don’t you think?”

Obi-Wan stutters again for a moment, unsure how to proceed. But then determination replaces uncertainty and his hand slides down her arm to take a hold of her wrist. He kisses it first, the light scruff marks from her initial fall, then guides her elbow to his mouth to press his lips onto the wound.

Her heart stops.

It is as if time itself stops, electricity running through her bloodstream, a chasm open up before them into which they can do nothing but fall. It feels like some subtle boundary had been crossed, an unspoken rule broken, and all it took was for his lips to touch her skin, for her to smile a smile so barren of ice and falsity and meant just for him, just like the name she had given him.

Satine moves to kiss him, a rash decision on her part, because the sudden shift in balance only makes the dizziness worse and she ends up with her head on his shoulder instead, almost knocking him down with the force of the impact. He steadies her gently, still half in shock from the unexpected influx of emotions. There is something sweet in the way he cradles her head, in the fondness in his voice.

“Told you not to move.”

She only mumbles a reply, so he lowers himself down onto the hard ground, his arm under her head and her body seeking more of him warmth.

“Still dropped me.”

When Qui-Gon returns hours later, it is to a Padawan and a future Duchess deep in slumber, curled up around each other and content for the first time since they started the mission. He smiles, shrugging off his robe and tucking it over them before propping himself against the root of a tree to keep watch.

Whatever implication this moment brings, the flaws in the Jedi way Obi-Wan faces, he will have to face alone. After all, Qui-Gon had never been the perfect Jedi, and there might be a lesson to be learned from this in the end.

Happiness is scarce for two children thrust into the battlefield, but it comes nonetheless.

 


End file.
